The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 2,795 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Webster: DeepSeek hard-censors 85% of politically sensitive topics in Promptfoo benchmark
“We did a benchmark on Chinese politically sensitive topics that, that found that about 85% of those topics in our test set were hard censored.”
Schimpf: Sam Altman publicly committed OpenAI to supporting US national defense
“Sam especially has been very clear that he supports our war fighters and he cares about having the best minds in AI working on national security and like who better exists to work through these hard problems.”
Schimpf: Russia retooled defense production and outproduces all of NATO on munitions
“Empirically, Russia, You know, about same duration, about two years to retool their industry against defense production. They are now out producing all of NATO on munitions.”
Horowitz: African Americans overindex in crypto ownership relative to other assets
“And in fact, if you look at the African American population, there's one asset class that they over index in and it's blockchain crypto.”
Andreessen: Less than 0.4% of CHIPS Act funding has been disbursed
“As of today, they have only literally dispersed 0.4% of the chip sacks money to any of these companies.”
Andreessen: Six Top AI Models Are Hitting a Performance Ceiling
“There is this very interesting asymptotic kind of thing that's happening right now where, you know, two years ago, there was one, you know, LLM that was like way out ahead of everybody else's, which was opening eyes. And sitting here today, there's like six th…”
Andreessen: Social Media Moderation Staff Have Migrated to AI Labs
“A lot of the people who did this kind of work, the sort of trust and safety or censorship work at the internet companies had just rotated and joined the AI companies.”
Andreessen: Valueless meme coin grew to $300M market cap in four days
“There's a meme coin with no underlying value that four days ago was worth nothing and is now worth three hundred million dollars, right?”
Andreessen: Biden's proposed unrealized gains tax starts at a $100M threshold
“So it is a threshold of a hundred million dollars.”
Plaid CEO: CFPB's open banking rules will face widespread lawsuits
“I'm certain it's gonna be sued by, like, I don't know, a gajillion different companies. I know the banks, the big banks want to sue it, the small banks want to sue it, like a bunch of fintechs want to, it's all, all, all over.”
Andreessen: Games Are the Only Known Killer Apps for VR and AR
“Both VR and AR, like, it's crystal clear. The known killer apps right now are games, like, by a very wide margin.”
Uncensored AI companion apps can reach 20 million monthly web visits
“They're growing, but maybe not the zero to twenty million monthly web visits that some of these uncensored companion apps can get.”
Andreessen: Incumbent universities control accreditation boards to block federal funding from competitors
“Guess who for those accreditation agencies, guess what they are composed of. They are composed of the incumbents. So the Northeast, you know, college, whatever accreditation council is like, literally it's board of trustees is all of the top Northeastern, you …”
Horowitz: Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot hasn't worked yet
“The Optimus Prime thing that, that Tesla's building hasn't really worked actually yet.”
Horowitz: Elon Musk cut X headcount 80% versus 8-15% tech average
“It was really interesting to see Elon reduce X by 80%. And then everybody else had numbers like eight or 10 or 15%. And Companies of the same generation with the same kind of growth with the same basically profile.”
Andreessen: Dodd-Frank expanded mega-banks and crushed new U.S. bank charters
“So what they did was they put in place a legal regime called Dodd-Frank and a bunch of other regulations that had the result, you know, sitting here 15 years later of the too big to fail banks are now much larger than they were before. So the exact opposite. Y…”
Horowitz: US printed more money post-2009 than in all prior history
“We printed more money since 2009 than we did in the whole rest of the country's history combined.”
Horowitz: Blockchain technology offers viable solutions for detecting deepfakes
“I also think we need technological solutions, not just regulatory solutions for things like deep fakes that kind of help us get to, you know, what's human, what's not human. And interesting, a lot of those are kind of you know, viable now based on kind of bloc…”
Huff: Living near coal plants releases more radiation than nuclear plants
“The radiation exposure from living next to a coal plant is higher than the radiation exposure from living next to a nuclear power plant.”
Casado: Autonomous vehicle unit economics remain worse than Uber and Lyft
“We've invested seventy five billion dollars as an industry, and while we do have autonomous vehicles on the road, and they're great, and they're solving real problems, the unit economics are still worse than, say, Uber and Lyft, because they're competing again…”
Choi: Hamas stopped accepting Bitcoin donations because the blockchain is traceable
“And, you know, even Hamas, like, I think in like, 20, 22, 23 announced that they were no longer gonna be accepting Bitcoin because it was too traceable.”
Hicks: DoD flexible acquisition pathways processed $35B, saving up to six years
“Over thirty five billion dollars have gone through these pathways since 2021 across nearly 200 programs. They've shaved up to six years off transition and delivery timelines for warfighter priorities.”
China is actively investing in and will deploy autonomous weapons
“We know that China is, you know, investing in similar technologies. We know they're going to move out on it,”
The U.S. military fires $2 million missiles at $100,000 aerial threats
“As a result, we're shooting Patriot missiles and, you know, advanced air-to-air missiles at these 100,000 dollars threats, shooting two million dollar missiles at them.”
Sramek: California Forever city is designed for up to 400,000 residents
“And then imagine that it was a city for up to 400,000 people that was entitled and approved at once, and so you knew that for the next you knew that for the next 30 years, if this office is going to work and you'll be able to hire talent there, there'll be eno…”
Horowitz: US military white enlistees dropped from 44k to 25k
“44,000 white enlistees in twenty-eighteen and 25,000 in twenty-twenty-three, with the biggest drop-off coming between twenty-twenty-two and twenty-twenty-three.”
Gallagher: TikTok will not go public in US under ByteDance ownership
“If you are invested in ByteDance, I would assume you want TikTok to go public in America. Ah, that's not gonna happen under the current ownership structure.”
Gallagher: Huawei is rebounding using SMIC semiconductors and US tech access
“Like right now Huawei is off the mat. It's coming back with SMIC semiconductors, in part because they still have access to U.S. Technology, right?”
Horowitz: Bitcoin reached a $1 trillion market cap without a corporate structure
“Bitcoin started in 2008 and it's, you know, a piece of software and there's probably four engineers working on it at this point and there's no company and it's worth a trillion dollars.”
Andreessen: Google's AI image generator depicted 1940s Nazis as racially diverse
“Well, we learned something very valuable over the last few days with a new Google image generator, which is we learned out that the Nazis were actually quite diverse. It turns out there were lots of black and brown Nazis in stormtrooper uniforms in, in the str…”
Dixon: Stack Overflow web traffic dropped 40% due to AI code models
“I mean, like to me, the canary in the coal mine was stack overflow, which my understanding, I, we used to obviously, we used to be investors before they got acquired. And my understanding is that's one of the key things that went into the training algorithms f…”
Andreessen: AI detection software in schools will fail and falsely accuse students
“There are various attempts by companies to do like AI detectors now. You know, was this text written by AI and schools are actually starting to use that. And I think we can definitively, that will not work. Yeah. So what we can tell, there's already been cases…”
Horowitz: Diverse university students face lower graduation rates than average
“First of all, like if you look at graduation rates or, you know, outcomes or so forth for diverse students are much worse than for your main students.”
Horowitz: Half of Companies Are Dropping Bachelor's Degree Requirements
“There was just a Report that like half of companies are dropping their like bachelor degree requirement, which kind of says, well, the credential no longer means much.”
Andreessen: Up to 75% of academic research fails replication
“Depending by field up to 75% of the research in a lot of fields doesn't replicate.”
Andreessen: Up to 75 percent of published academic research fails to replicate
“Somewhere between like a third to on, on the low end, like you know, a quarter to a third and on the high end, like up to two thirds or three quarters of all published research doesn't replicate.”
Mensch: 2020-2021 AI research suffered from flawed scaling laws in GPT-3 and Gopher
“There was also a misconception on GPT-free and basically in 20, 21, every paper made this mistake.”
Neumann: a16z invested $350M into Flow
“Who are we to not want to meet each person that our partners, who not only gave us three hundred and fifty million dollars, but our real partners suggested?”
Novartis's one-time gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy costs $2.1 million
“You know, in the case of treating a baby that had, you know, something like somatic muscular atrophy that would have otherwise died, a one and done gene therapy from Novartis, this is a therapy that's worth about, it's cost about 2.1 million dollars, effective…”
Park: GPT-3 simulated COVID-19 discussions without prior pandemic training data
“We basically asked GPT-III to create a community that has to talk about COVID and vaccination, vaccination policy. And you would wonder, it shouldn't be able to do that in theory, because it doesn't know anything about COVID. It doesn't know anything about the…”
Andreessen: AI will allow actors to scan themselves into 3D environments
“These systems and all the variations that are coming up you know, the capabilities are going to become available over the next few years, including, you know, rendering video, you know, we're going to get to the point now where like, for example, an actor is g…”
Andreessen: Generative AI will allow every screenplay to be rendered as video
“Most, look, oh, look, most people who write a Hollywood screenplay never see it produced. They never see it on screen. Right. And now all of a sudden, like all of those screenplays could be produced. Right. And turned into, you know, maybe not a movie that's c…”
Field: Figma did not spend years in development before contacting users
“I think that everyone that talks to me and says, hey we're trying to build our startup like Figma. We're going to take years to develop it. And we'll go talk to the, our first user. And I'm like, first of all, it's not what we did.”
Ghodsi: MMLU benchmark scores are inflated due to web data contamination
“MMLU is just a multi-choice question that's on the web. Ask a question. Here's, is the answer A, B, C, D, and then it says what the right answer is. And it's on the web. You can deliberately train on it and create an LLM that crushes it on that. Okay. Or you c…”
Anthropic plans to formalize a safe scaling framework with capability checkpoints
“One broad way that we've been thinking about it from the beginning and are probably going to work more on formalizing it over the coming months and years is this idea of sort of safe scaling or checkpointing. So there could be this kind of alternating step whe…”
James Webb Space Telescope showed early galaxies grew faster than predicted
“We built the web telescope, it did what it was supposed to do, it produced beautiful pictures, and right away we could see that the galaxies grew even faster than we thought. And so even though we had the information from Hubble and all the simulations and cal…”
Meta Internal Studies Show In-Office Employees Outperform Native Remote Hires
“Some studies are sort of coming out meta is sort of saying like they've noticed that people are back at the office three days a week are more effective, or if they've already been in the office for a while before they went out on remote versus native remote”